[jcranmer]

Linking World War I to an oil race between Germany and Britain is... really pushing it. To the extent that Anglo-German enmity played a major role in forming the alliance blocs pre-WWI, that is more because Kaiser Wilhelm canned Bismarck in favor of a more aggressive foreign policy that, quite frankly, pissed everybody else off, leading to German diplomatic isolation.

The idea that competition for oil was a major player in that is only viable if you ignore the minor fact that causes happen before actions. To summarize the underlying assertions: the Berlin-Baghdad railway, built in 1889, was needed to transport the new critical resource of oil from its discovery in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 for the insatiable demand of coal-fired dreadnoughts like HMS Dreadnought (1906). (Yes, coal-fired--as far as I'm aware, all of the German capital ships built or planned before or during WWI were primarily coal-fired. The decisive move from coal to oil happens largely at the tail end of WWI, way too late to be a major factory in strategic thinking to motivate foreign policy in the run up to WWI.)